Peter Somuah is a Ghanaian trumpeter and bandleader based in the Netherlands, who grew up in Accra playing in highlife bands and listening to (1960s) golden-era highlife legends. A suitably vintage analogue aesthetic informs this attention-grabbing sophomore album, the follow-up to his fine ACT debut Letter to the Universe. That project found Somuah repositioning jazz as a language of the world; here he reinforces jazz’s African origins and investigates British colonial interference along the way, setting out the album’s stall with ‘The Rhythm’, a spoken word explanation of ‘highlife’ (the nickname Ghanaian musicians playing for British colonial rulers gave their mix of western and local styles) by highlife legend Koo Nimo.

Septuagenarian vocalist/pianist Pat Thomas turns up on his own ‘We Give Thanks’, its off-kilter rhythms, dancing guitar riffs and brass-led declamatory joy organically enhanced by vintage analogue equipment and to-the-manor-born nouse of his band of Dutch musicians.

Afrobeat horn patterns feature across the album - highlife was crucial to Fela’s singular creation - and particularly on the excellent ‘Mental Slavery’, a Fela-inspired original that interrogates the intergenerational effects of colonialism in time tested think-while-you-dance style. Tracks including ‘Chop Chop’ and ‘Reimagined’ use jazz as a conduit to refresh highlife with new elements, more than half a century after its golden age. Ancient to future music, then, to dance to.